Sean Manning's The Things That Need Doing

Sean Manning's The Things That Need Doing was a hard book to read, not least because it is, start to finish, a book about a young man's mother dying. The book's difficulty, though, for me, was more than merely subject matter: stress young in the description one sentence prior. The Things That Need Doing is, certainly, a moving and tender book of a pretty overwhelming love of son for mother, and it's equally a mesmerizing glipmse of the world of late-stage life-saving hospital work, but it's also a book very very very much centered around young Sean Manning, a writer whose work (as an editor) I've been excited by often recently.

Let's maybe step back and establish some things: though certainly my top 10 any art thing—albums, books, films—likely feature at least 50% of material either about or made by dudes who fit several demographic categories I do as well (dudes, white, middle-class, educated, etc.), I get tired of stuff that features, well, me. I've gone on about this stuff before, elsewhere and here at Corduroy, so I don't want to get too much into it. I'm saying this mostly because I want to signal just who's writing this review, and with what mentality and agenda (lest I sound too pompous: my first book of stories has just been released, and a majority of the work in there features narrators exactly like I am—meaning, I guess, I bemoan this stuff, but it's not like I've got some pocketful of silver bullets).

Back to Manning: the easiest rebut to the above is, well, dude, he's writing nonfiction, and he's writing about his life and his mom and his months in Cleveland hospitals and his experience watching Lebron and the Cavs, etc. Too all of which I say: yes, of course, absolutely. And it actually occurs to me that maybe I've pooched the screw on this one already: I liked lots of aspects of this book, and read it glad and fast on a Saturday afternoon.

Here's maybe an easier way to get at this: the books Manning's edited up until now are writerly books, featuring other writers talking about 1) their favorite books, 2) their favorite baseball players, and 3) their favorite concerts. Meaning what? Meaning this is someone who's editorial impulse has so far been to let artists talk about the other art they like, in categories sometimes aside from those in which they work. Why's this significant? Because Manning's story of his mother's death (months and months long, plus flashbacks) features all sorts of Klosterman/Horby-ish moments of significant emotional impact happening simultaneous with moments of sports and/or music.

There's nothing wrong with this—lots of us do this, and it's not at heart a bad venture—but it's a strange thing, how this happens. Here's the way to talk about this in exceptionally positive terms: Manning's so willing to tell his mother's story completely that he's also willing to let himself look, quite often, pretty self-involved, pretty self-centered. Which is a gutsy thing to do, as a writer—to allow oneself to look bad on the page for the sake of the story.

I don't know. I go back and forth on this stuff. For the record: I blame Klosterman for this affect/tic—he's the one who took Hornby's slight, self-depricating style and Americanized it, blocked it hard and heavy for the American stage. What it comes down to, for me, is that this book, Manning's The Things That Need Doing, is, certainly, yes, a moving and beautiful book about his mom's death, and it's about how he and his dad (his parents were divorced but, touchingly, his dad was 100% present for his ex-wife's death) made decisions and coped, and it ends just gorgeously, achingly. However, here's what you realize on the last page: Manning gets out of the way and just recalls—he doesn't try so hard to make himself appear on the page, doesn't try to make the reader see/think/feel certain things about him. It's a gorgeous last several pages, and the fact that Manning didn't offer more writing like that earlier can be frustrating, but it's also exciting to think of what he's capable of, what he'll be able to do when he's trying to stuff less self onto each page.